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Marta Morazzoni

Biography

Marta Morazzoni

Marta Morazzoni is not only an author of novels, essays and short stories, but also a theatre critic and literary translator, having translated the works of Edith Wharton, Olaf Olafsson and Eran Kroband among others. She works as a teacher of literature in high school in Gallarate.

Morazzoni was born in 1950. Having defended her MA thesis on the Eskimos living in Canada and Greenland, she graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in the University of Milan with a degree in cultural anthropology. It may be assumed that her interest in the people of the north triggered her preference for the white light, cool space and restrained static scenery frequently visible in her books.

A literary vocation, which Morazzoni felt just after her studies, resulted in a few short stories which she sent to the literary critic Pietro Citati in 1983. In 1986, thanks to Citati and his enthusiastic review, the publishing house Longanesi released Morazzonni’s first collection called La ragazza col turbante. The book, translated into nine languages and awarded the Premio Racalmare Leonardo Sciascia prize the following year , became a huge success. The collection comprises five literary fantasies, of which the protagonists are well-known artists or rulers, and explores the fate of famous pieces of art; thus, one may read about Mozart and Constance, Lorenzo da Ponte, the Emperor Charles V, or Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. One thread connecting these texts is the brutality which prevails in the relationships between these characters. Morazzoni skillfully creates the atmosphere of suspense, secrecy, danger and the expectation of something that does not always happen.

The next decade was a prolific and successful period for Morazzoni. She wrote four novels, three of which were awarded particular prizes. The first novel, L’invenzione della verità was published in 1988 and awarded the Premio Campiello. Casa materna, winner of Premio Selezione Campiello was published in 1992. In 1996, the author published the next novel, L’estuario, and one year later, Il caso Courrier, which was again awarded the Premio Campiello.

At the turn of the century, Morazzoni briefly moved away from writing dominated by the past and, in 2002, published a disturbing novel, Una lezione di stile, set in modern England. She returned to the past, however, and great historic figures in 2005, in a narrative set in the 18th century, Un incontro inatteso per il consigliere Goethe. This period also allowed her to test her strengths in other literary genres. In 2006, she published an artistic and literary guide to Amsterdam, La città del desiderio, Amsterdam. Here, the lover of Vermeer and Flemish culture, shows the reader around the city with passion and lyricism. Following this in 2008, Morazzoni wrote a kind of literary autobiography, or a personal guide to literature entitled Trentasette libri e un cane. In the same year, she published a collection of lectures on her favourite and most valued authors: Proust, Musil, Poe and Goethe. She returned to narratives and historic figures in her last two novels, the protagonists of which were unusual, brave and emblematic women. One of them, unknown though reported in historical chronicles, was a young princess forced to enter a convent, whose story is told in the novel La nota segreta (2010). With an amazing talent for singing, Paola Pietra, an extremely strong, uncompromising woman open to various forms of life stood up against the system. In her last book Il fuoco di Jeanne (2014), Morazzoni tried to approach the story from girlhood to adulthood of a protagonist named Jeanne D’Arc, modelled on Joan of Arc. Rather than approach her protagonist as symbol and archetype, Morazzoni reconstructs the figure buried under the layers of myth and legend and creates a modern historical novel.

The books of Marta Morazzoni entrance through delicately built emotion, perfect language, sophisticated surroundings, and masterful images which draw in the reader. The beautiful visual quality of her prose and its intense yet ambiguous emotion determine its power and peculiarity. The author sensitively brings the reader into remote corners of time and space, into places and pasts that are at once known and unknown, and renders experiences almost real and tangible. Morazzoni’s prose may be perfectly described by the oxymoron ‘invented truth’. The one variable in the evolution of this author’s writing is her style, its initial sophisticated elegance, linearity and cool moderation being gradually replaced by sensuality and dynamism.